Lost trumpet

122
THE LOST TRUMPET
Nor had we. I took her down through the Bab el
Zuweiya into that wilderness of abandoned khans
where strange trades, ancient and evil as the East
itself, are still plied; where the scum of Europe’s
dance-halls carry on in secret, lamplit rooms unclean
entertainment for the smuggled audiences. We had
passed through shrouded doors and down twisting
corridors and so through other doors, after the
making of passwords and signs, into one of those
lamplit theatres ; we had sat side by side watching
the Gomorrhan horrors enacted in the sweating
silence, with the light so low that others also present
—and we seemed the only white people there—were
dim and faceless. Twice Pelagueya had leaned for¬
ward to cry out; then stayed herself. Once she
had covered her face with her hands and then dropped
those hands again, for not to look would have been
to fail the bargain she had made with me. Perhaps
she was the only white woman who had ever seen that
vileness. . . . They led the woman and animal—
both bewildered, dull-eyed automata—off through the
musk-stenching curtains at last, and I rose to my
feet, and Pelagueya walked out beside me, the colour
drained from her cheeks, her eyes feverish.
“Anything more ?”
“But plenty.”
Yet I need give no record of that plenty here.
It had seemed to me that at last Pelagueya might
know something of the horror and terror of that
life she had but touched with tentative, amused hands
for so many years—that underpinning of cruelty